THE EMBARGO ON FARMING 193 



and the world will advance more rapidly when the 

 detached farm is gone and some new form of agricul- 

 tural organization takes its place. And such per- 

 sons believe that the solution of farming is through 

 wholesale production and the organization of agri- 

 culture along modern industrial lines. The food 

 we need should be produced by specialization, by 

 gangs of men working as in great manufacturing 

 plants, the farms being operated by large companies 

 or under socialistic or semisocialistic organization. 

 Under such an arrangement one farm would be 

 devoted exclusively to dairying, another to the 

 raising of poultry, another to truck-gardening, and 

 the large estates of the West and South to wheat, 

 cattle, cotton, tobacco, and large-scale plantation 

 production. It has been estimated that with agri- 

 culture organized as is industry 20,000 men could 

 feed 2,000,000 people, and that millions of farmers 

 could be released to other lines of activity. 



It is, of course, a very wasteful system under 

 which men remain on the farm all the year round 

 when their working period is only six or seven months. 

 There is also a waste in the raising of diversified crops 

 on each farm. It requires far more labor per unit 

 of production than would be necessarj'- for large- 

 scale production. Moreover, under existing condi- 

 tions the individual farmer is unable to own tractor 

 ploughs, machines for planting and harvesting, the 

 use of which labor-saving devices would be possible 



